Alien as an Abortion Parable

Ridley Scott's 1979 thriller was greeted with no particular fanfare by the reviewers, and if there was a critical consensus it was that the film was at best watchable pabulum-reasonably professionally handled visually and enjoy ably scary, but without significant nuance to qualify for discussion as art. Jack Kroll's comment was typical: "It's about time someone made a science fiction thriller that thrills, that has no truck with metaphysics, philosophy or theosophy and just boils everything down to the pure ravishingly vulgar essence of fright."

Aside from its manifest violence, the only aspect of Alien that attracted much critical fire was what one reviewer called its "gratuitous sexism." True to a two hundred-yearold tradition of gothic horror, the film relies for its most gut-wrenching effects on the spectacle of a helpless beautiful woman threatened with violence by an unspeakable, inhuman, but quintessentially masculine horror.

Significantly, one scene repeatedly mentioned as a "gratuitous" injection of voyeurism involves Sigourney Weaver's stripping down to her underwear just prior to a final attack by the alien and her subsequent blasting of the creature into space and, presumably, oblivion. The implication seems to be that Alien was overall good, clean, horrible but simple-minded fun, and shouldn't have been compromised by random intrusions of irrelevant sex.

A close look at Alien, however, reveals that not only is sexuality not occasionally intrusive in an otherwise pristine film, but that sexual symbolism and iconography of a singular kind are pervasive throughout the film and may actually be its leitmotif.

What Alien is about is gestation and birth. The sexuality of the film has strong reproductive overtones that distinguish it from the kind of garden variety titillation of most thrillers. The centrality of the birth process to the film is not hard to demonstrate. The very logo of the movie, used incessantly in publicity and advertisement, was the cracked alien "egg" about to "give birth" to the horror within. The central action of the movie details the metamorphic progress of the creature, from egg, to placental parasite clinging to-and then in-its hapless host, to the savage "infant" monster that tunnels its way out of a crewman's body, to the mature lizard creature of the film's closing scenes.

The monster itself is only one part...